We’re a dispersed team. Spread all over town, the country, and even the world. Seven of us. Any one of us could be working in their underwear all day long, and the rest of us would be none-the-wiser. This is not something that could have happened a decade ago. The cost, and complication of it would have made it tedious, and frustrating. The thought of sending faxes to someone in their underwear is pretty funny though.

We used to utilize quite a few technologies to stay in touch. We buttressed together a system of email, occasional im, our (now) competitors’ products, and FTP to make it possible to collaborate. It was a lonely, and often sucky process. We never knew where the granular chunk of information we were looking for was.

It didn’t feel miserable. We didn’t know any better. We got a lot of stuff done with our shifty, rickety duck-taped flow.

Of course this is eventually leading up to Staction, so let’s skip to it. Staction blows our doors off daily. It’s foolish to say so. Why wouldn’t we like our own app? We’re honest, we’d tell you if we didn’t like it. Better yet, you wouldn’t even know it existed if we didn’t like it. We use the hell out of our apps before we let them into the public. Even for the beta.

It’s really hard to talk about how Staction has changed our workflow. It’s like trying to think why you like pb & j, or mac & cheese. Eventually things just turn into a basic part of your daily existence.

In an effort to gain some needed perspective, let’s talk about some uniquely changed ways that we work now. A few facts:

• A typical day for us involves 150+ public posts in Staction. In the old days, that would have been via email, and web app comments. It simply didn’t happen. We just talked less. There is a general sense of community that we never had before.

• We live in Staction daily. We went from 3-4 apps for productivity and communication to 1. Less logins, less checking, less in general.

• We guesstimate that a simple thing like creating a todo on a new project would take as much as 3 minutes in our old system. It might not sound like much, but how many todos do you make in a year? It adds up. We’re fast now. Light-weight, and fast.

• We built basic reporting in Staction. The cool thing is that we almost never use it. There’s this general sense of “just knowing” what’s going on. It used to be a game of hide-and-seek to find out. In fact, it was pretty common to see several emails a day come through that just said “what are you doing right now?”

• We used to do a lot of process things that seemed necessary. We filled out client details in our PM app even though we really only needed them in our billing app. We actively created something akin to project briefs in our old way. Today we actively create conversations.

We work faster and more simply today. We talk to each other more. We know about ski trips in the same breath as time entries. Project managing was such a chore…. This just feels like hanging out with your friends all day, and finding out what they’re up to. When you can turn work into a conversation, it doesn’t feel like such a chore.